“Reading is not modern,” declares a catchy promotional slogan—if I recall correctly, from the Czech site for conservative philosophy Delian Diver. The message is obvious: we read books because we refuse to march with the dim-witted crowd.
But look a little deeper and things get more complicated. The slogan carries two possible meanings, and each points in a very different direction.
The first meaning rests on the simple fact that the world is always changing. Something is forever becoming “outdated,” and something else is temporarily “modern” before it too collapses into obsolescence. That is the fate of every generation. No one in the history of Western civilization has ever managed to stand perfectly still amid the rush of time and social change. What we can do, however, is offer an alternative path—not a future of cultural decline, but a future shaped by cultivation, learning, and continuity.
The second interpretation is more ambitious. Here the slogan gestures toward modernity itself—toward the civilizational rupture brought by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, a break as profound as the shift from hunter-gatherer life to settled agriculture thousands of years earlier. In this sense, “reading is unfashionable” can function as a quiet rejection of the entire modern era, a stance surprisingly common among very young conservatives. Enough time has passed for the pre-modern world to be shrouded in selective nostalgia, allowing romantic fantasies about the virtues of an older order—fantasies that are, ironically, thoroughly modern. The people of that earlier world rarely cherished the lofty ideals we project back onto them.
Seen through this second lens, reading is unmistakably modern. Before modernity, only a tiny sliver of society possessed the ability to read at all.